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U.S. Resists Push by Allies for Tactical Nuclear Cuts

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Tallinn, Estonia, on Thursday.Credit
Virginia Mayo/Associated Press

TALLINN, Estonia — Fresh from signing a strategic nuclear arms agreement with Russia, the United States is parrying a push by several NATO allies to withdraw its aging stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe.

Speaking Thursday at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers here, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Obama administration was not opposed to cuts in these battlefield weapons, mostly bombs and short-range missiles locked in underground vaults on air bases in five NATO countries.

But Mrs. Clinton ruled out removing these weapons unless Russia agreed to cuts in its arsenal, which is at least 10 times the size of the American one. And she also appeared to make reductions in the American stockpile contingent on Russia’s being more transparent about its weapons and willing to move them away from the borders of NATO countries.

“We should recognize that as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance,” Mrs. Clinton said. “As a nuclear alliance, sharing nuclear risks and responsibilities widely is fundamental.”

The push to withdraw tactical weapons from Europe has gained momentum in recent weeks, with Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Norway jointly petitioning NATO to take up the issue. Many analysts consider these weapons a dangerous relic of the cold war, expensive to safeguard and deadly if they fell into the wrong hands.

“This is big progress, compared to the situation a few months ago,” said Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, whose Free Democratic Party calls for the weapons’ removal.

But other NATO members, including Turkey and several former Soviet satellites, are reluctant to remove them, fearing it would make them vulnerable to Russia. Given the deep political divisions, officials on both sides of the Atlantic fret that this debate could splinter the alliance.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech amounted to an appeal for all sides to take a deep breath. “We view tonight as the beginning of this discussion,” she said, noting that any decisions should be put off until a meeting of NATO leaders this fall.

The meeting on Thursday came at a time when NATO’s 28 members had been rethinking the rationale for this 61-year alliance. The United States is pushing to streamline NATO’s bureaucracy and make it more responsive to combat missions in places like Afghanistan. NATO, American officials note, has 14 agencies, 6,000 employees, and an annual budget of nearly $7 billion.

NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, took up the American cry for an overhaul. “We are not just talking about cosmetic surgery,” Mr. Rasmussen said in a news conference. “Our headquarters is a paradise for people who love committees, but I have to tell you, I am not one of those.”

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He also lined up with Mrs. Clinton on the nuclear question, saying he believed that “the presence of American nuclear weapons in Europe is an essential part of a credible deterrent.”

Even those eager to see an end to these weapons acknowledged the process would be lengthy and would require unity within NATO. “We’re not in a hurry,” Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said in an interview. “We don’t believe in acting fast or acting unilaterally.”

There are no official numbers on tactical nuclear weapons, but analysts estimate the United States has from 150 to 250 in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey. Russia may have 2,000 or more weapons, some stored in places like the Kaliningrad region, close to Poland.

These numbers are way down from their peak during the cold war, when the United States had some 8,000 tactical nuclear warheads and the Soviet Union had upwards of 23,000. But disarmament has slowed in recent years, partly because the success in cutting strategic nuclear warheads has made tactical weapons, however outmoded they may be as instruments of war, seem more vital to the American nuclear umbrella in Europe.

Mrs. Clinton emphasized the importance of missile-defense technology as another way to mitigate nuclear threats. She called on NATO to make missile defense a core mission, though she said she did not expect NATO allies to pay for the American system planned for Eastern Europe.

And she said the Obama administration would seek to put tactical weapons on the table in the next round of arms reduction talks with Russia, something Russia so far has refused to do.

Earlier on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton met with Estonia’s foreign minister, Urmas Paet, and reiterated America’s commitment to defend it and other NATO allies from Russian aggression. Estonia, which languished under Soviet domination for decades, was struck in 2007 by a sophisticated cyberattack, which it believes originated inside the Russian government.

“He’s old enough to remember the Soviet occupation,” Mrs. Clinton said of Mr. Paet, who turned 36 this week.

“We believe there is no sphere of influence, that there is no veto power that Russia or any country has over any country in Europe, or in this region, concerning membership in NATO,” she said.

For all the talk about nuclear threats, it was an ash cloud, not a mushroom cloud, that dominated hallway chatter here. Mrs. Clinton flew here via Spain, giving Iceland’s erupting volcano a wide berth. But she faced a tense moment early on Thursday when the ash drifted back over Estonia. Her pilots headed for Tallinn, unsure if they would able to land. As dawn broke over the airport, the skies cleared.

A version of this article appears in print on April 23, 2010, on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Resists Push by Allies For Tactical Nuclear Cuts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe